Hello Steenstn, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms you're generally doing a really good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as explained here. There's just one on the bottom left of this page that came out with one end much wider than the other, try to keep the ends evenly sized in this exercise.

Your contour curves are well aligned and I can see you're working on varying their degree. I think looking at this diagram may help you. It demonstrates how to vary your contour curves to show a form in different orientations, as well as which ends to place a contour ellipse on. The contour ellipse on the end(s) is another contour curve, we just happen to be able to see the whole ellipse because the end is facing towards the viewer. As a general rule of thumb these curves should get wider get as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form. This concept is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work is very well done. You're building your constructions step by step, starting with simple forms and adding complexity to them where you need to. You're demonstrating an understanding of how your forms exist in 3d space and connect together with specific relationships. You're doing a good job but I do have a couple of pointers to help you to continue get the most out of these constructional exercises in the future.

The first of these relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

1 Actions in 2D space, where we're just putting lines down on a page, without necessarily considering the specific nature of the relationships between the forms they're meant to represent and the forms that already exist in the scene.

2 Actions in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about how each form we draw exists in 3D space, and how it relates to the existing 3D structures already present. We draw them in a manner that actually respects the 3D nature of what's already there, and even reinforces it.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose, but many of those marks would contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

Fortunately you don't cut back inside your forms that much. I've marked in red on your scorpion where it looks like you drew a sphere for the head, then drew another smaller one inside it. This perhaps isn't the best construction to knock you on for cutting into forms, because I know Uncomfortable slices into a box in this demo. There is a bit of a difference between making a cut in 3D, being mindful of the form that is on the page, and redrawing the form without a defined relationship to the form that's already there. There's another explanation in this diagram on the difference between taking actions in 2D and 3D. Regardless, we'd like you to use addition for organic constructions in future.

Another way you can accidentally cut into your silhouette is if there is a gap between passes of an ellipse, and you use the inner one for the foundation of your construction. This leaves a stray line outside the silhouette. It's totally normal for there to be some looseness to ellipses, as we ask students to prioritise confidence over accuracy. They will get more accurate with practice. In future if there's a gap between passes on your ellipse I'd like you to treat the outermost line as the foundation for your construction.

Instead, when we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3d forms to the existing structure. forms with their own complete silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.

This is all part of understanding that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for both you and the viewer to believe in that lie.

You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo You can also see some good examples of this in the lobster and shrimp demos on the informal demos page As Uncomfortable has been pushing this concept more recently, it hasn't been fully integrated into the lesson material yet (it will be when the overhaul reaches Lesson 4). Until then, those submitting for official critiques basically get a preview of what is to come.

This is something you're largely doing an excellent job of already, but I've noted on this page in blue, a couple of spots where you attempted to extend your silhouettes without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist in 3D space. I also pointed to a couple of whole 3D forms you added, which is something you're doing well, and doing often, which is great to see.

I did notice a few places where you're adding quite a few contour lines on a single form, for example the eyes on this fly.

Contour lines themselves fall into two categories. You've got those that sit along the surface of a single form (this is how they were first introduced in the organic forms with contour lines exercise, because it is the easiest way to do so), and you've got those that define the relationship and intersection between multiple forms - like those from the form intersections exercise. By their very nature, the form intersection type only really allows you to draw one such contour line per intersection, but the first type allows you to draw as many as you want. The question comes down to this: how many do you really need?"

Unfortunately, that first type of contour line suffers from diminishing returns. The first one you add will probably help a great deal in making that given form feel three dimensional. The second however will help much less - but this still may be enough to be useful. The third, the fourth... their effectiveness and contribution will continue to drop off sharply, and you're very quickly going to end up in a situation where adding another will not help. I find it pretty rare that more than two is really necessary. Anything else just becomes excessive.

Be sure to consider this when you go through the planning phase of the contour lines you wish to add. Ask yourself what they're meant to contribute. Furthermore, ask yourself if you can actually use the second (form intersection) type instead - these are by their very nature vastly more effective, because of how they actually define the relationship between forms. This relationship causes each form to reinforce the other, solidifying the illusion that they exist in three dimensions. They'll often make the first type somewhat obsolete in many cases.

When it comes to the legs of your insects, I can see you're making really good use of the sausage method, although there are some approaches to building up structure on top of those base sausage armatures that work better than others. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here and here. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

The thing to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms shown in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this is the technique we'd like you to use to construct animal legs in lesson 5 too.

All in all, great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.